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English Market Produces Energy With Kinetic Plates
Johnathan Martinez writes "Sainsbury's market in England has installed 'kinetic energy' plates in the parking lot of its store in Gloucester. The plates are an experiment with a newer energy producing technology. The plates create as much as 30 kWh of energy as cars drive over them. The weight of the cars puts pressure on the plates creating kinetic energy to run a generator. The current is used to power the store and will lower the energy consumption of the market."
This is just an gas powered electric generator, the likes of which rube goldberg would be proud of. You'd be better off siphoning a thimble of fuel from each car, selling it, and using the proceeds to buy electricity from the utility.
So when you drive in, it drains your battery to power their market. How the fuck is this 'green'?
...I could put these in my driveway, use it to charge the car and never have to buy energy again!
http://michaelsmith.id.au
is that energy extracted from the cars? then is not magically created, but just a inefficient way to suck energy from other people use of oil.
-Woof woof woof!
And the work for pressing the plates down is done by what? Maybe, that could be, uhmm... the cars driving over them, yes? So basically they are using their customers fuel to power their store and call that "green". Way to go, guys.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's theft!
By using these devices, they are stealing energy from the drivers. While one driver may not notice, as a whole, fuel usage is being diverted from all who drive over these things.
Life is not for the lazy.
"The kinetic plates are only one of many green energy projects that Sainsburyâ(TM)s hopes to incorporate in its stores". Yeah, because generating electricity from combustion engines operating in a very inefficient regime is fantastically green...
If this had been the average journalist I'd have given credit for ignorance, but this guys bio says that he's an "energy technology examiner", a "student in robotics" "working on a new process for harnessing wind energy" who hopes to make "a huge impact one day in the field of science."
I think he has a little way to go...
I have no fracking idea how any of these early posts are being modded "Insightful"..
Theft? Um, no, it's called "Gravity".
RTFA.
The car's weight puts pressure on the plates, which is used to generate power. It take no more fuel to drive over these plates than it would to drive over asphalt. And no, it doesn't drain the car's batteries either. Jesus.
Man, did someone beat ya'll with the stupid stick today???
Of course there is no free energy here. In other words the store is leeching a small amount of petrol energy from all the cars and trucks that drive over it, a little bit at a time. Due to efficiency losses this is a net loss for everyone. Gee, thanks.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Greenwash
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
of the anecdote about Franklin and his entrance door. When a friend complained about how difficult was to push that door, Franklin explained that the door was connected to a ground pump and every time someone opened the door, 2 gallons of water were extracted as well...
Even it wasn't stealing energy from the cars, we are in 'drop in the ocean' territory. Nice analysis here.
England market produces green energy ... Sainsburyâ(TM)s market of England has installed âkinetic energyâ(TM) plates in the parking lot of itâ(TM)s store in Gloucester.
What atrocious writing. Sainsbury's is a supermarket.
If the energy is just coming from what would normally be wasted as heat from the car's brakes etc, then it really is 'free'. Imagine it (Ideally) like this, instead of braking to get into the parking spot, you roll up a slight incline, the car slows and the plate 'gets' some energy due to the weight of the car pushing on it. The driver did not have to use the brakes as much or at all, so less heat was lost, and that energy went to the system instead of going off as heat.
Obviously this is an ideal scenario, but you can see how you can transfer energy in this way WITHOUT it being parasitic or 'costing' the car driver as all previous posters so angrily assumed.
Driving a car wastes tremendous amounts of energy, a lot of it as heat from the brakes, radiator etc.
If some of this can be transparently recovered (even though in this case it's probably a minuscule amount of what is wasted) , then everybody wins.
As many other commented, the energy comes off course from the petrol engine of the cars. 1. The efficiency of this system from petrol to electricity must be really low 2. It creates pollution right where you don't want it, in the city: Exhaust fumes plus tire wear
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If the plate's placed at a point in the road where you'd have to brake anyway, the energy's essentially free. It goes from being dissipated in the brakes to collected by the plate.
(Anyone with regenerative brakes can still complain.)
TFA calls it a "green energy project". The type of people who think this is green energy are the complete f-ing morons that side track the rest of us from real viable energy advancements.
Further more, the TFA claims this will "lower the energy consumption of the market". At the inefficiency of this (which is already limited to being no more efficient than a car is itself), it will actually increase the energy consumption of the market.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Since people usually slow down anyway when they enter a parking lot, it makes more sense to convert the kinetic energy into something useful than have everybody just brake and convert it into heat.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Hey if you pave a stretch of road with that, make the energy harvested available from a rail along the road and connect the engines of electric cars to that rail, do you get cars that can travel forever without spending any energy? OMG GREEN HOLY GRAIL!!
Also, pre-emptive 'whoosh' sound for anyone who wouldn't get it.
You just got troll'd!
The car is climbing over the plate before it drops (or out of a slight dip after it does). This requires a little extra gas and therefore it's coming out of the customer's pocket.
I mean if this is "free" energy, why not pave the streets with them?
I've got a better idea (TM).
1) Stick dynamos at each pole, with telephone cables wound around the spinning thingie
2) pigeon alights on cable, causing cable to stretch, and dynamo to spin
3) pigeon takes off, dynamo spins again in other direction
4) $$$profit$$
Basically to generate 30KWH of power requires about 41HP. In this case, the power would come from the car pressing down on the plate, but the car must then use additional power to climb off of the plate. Cars are far less efficient at generating power than a dedicated power plant (ICE is at best around 24% efficient not counting losses due to the drive train, a power plant is typically over 40% efficient).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
For those who are rightly saying this energy isn't free...
If the plates are positioned at the bottom of a downhill exit ramp, they will aid drivers braking, prividing kinetic energy without "stealing" drivers fuel. Somehow, I doubt this is where they will be positioned though
(Incidentally... a similar idea was to build tram / light-rail stations on the top of small hills. Thus gravity assists the train in braking and accelerating away from teh station)
Oh and Sainsburys is a British Supermarket, not an English Market..... Big difference !
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I suppose as long as they install it only in the parking spaces where the cars are coming to a stop anyway, then it wouldn't really be stealing from the drivers/cars. It'd also help them save on their brakes as well.
Then again, this is Slashdot, so someone's going to point out that people may not park right the first time, or that they may be driving across parking spaces to get to the other side instead of on the designated driving lanes, etc...I guess I'll shut up now.
Don't want to bitch or moan. But isn't that just stealing energy from cars?
There's no such thing as free energy. It probably will cost cars extra to drive over the plates. That is, the 30 kWh come from fossil fuel. Way to go!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This reminds me a story where the guy stole fractions of cents from each Bank Account. Nobody noticed !
Who is going to stop going to that market because of this highly imperceptible extra charge ? In this perspective it is ingenious. But can you imagine cities going this route in low speed limit zones ? Where will it stop ?
Energy saving wise, it is no good, gas motor would use that energy more efficiently, there is always a lost when you transfer one form of energy to another.
As for the guy who stole fractions of cents from the bank he was working at, he got caught by making to many expensive purchases, buying expensive cars to his family members, etc. so they finally investigated him because he was working at a bank. If I recall right, this story was borrowed by one of the Superman movies, but it occurred for real before that. It was then double fun to see it in Superman.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
30 kWh is something, but how long does it take to collect that? 30 kWh for each car hardly succeeds!
It could be calculated for each year, maybe..
Anyway kWh is a measure of amount of energy, not power. If the plates power would be 30 kW, it would take one hour to collect 30 kWh. But 30 kW is way more than the car normally uses.
But seriously, to what extent is this a gain, given that the energy "produced" must all originate in the petrol tanks of the cars visiting the supermarket. I suppose that it is a double gain for the supermarket in that they get some free electricity and also get to sell a bit more of the petrol that makes it. Or can it be shown that the power generated would otherwise have all been lost in braking for the speed-bumps in the car park?
Probably 2/3 of the comments so far seem to think this is some kind of perpetual motion machine con. Those people should be embarrassed.
It's not. It's simple. It's just slowing cars by converting kinetic energy into electrical, instead of dissipating it as heat in the brakes or converting it to potential energy like a speed bump.
There was a discussion a while back, I think here on Slashdot, about a device that used a revolving door to generate energy. It prompted exactly the same comments. What these people didn't seem to realize is, revolving doors have brakes, and that device replaces the brakes. Same damn thing.
Do you really think the engineers who designed this device didn't think it through? This reminds me why it's never a good idea to discuss physics on Slashdot. I leave it to psychologists to explain why there are so many kneejerk contrarians.
Wouldn't it be more useful to integrate such plates (smaller versions of course) in the stairs of your nearest subway station? Or any other public building? In cities like London, Berlin, Tokio, Paris, New York etc., etc. literally millions of people are using the subway. If you shut down the escalators you could even improve customer health) and generate even more energy! (just kidding :-)) Seriously though: At the core of the "smart", bidirectional and decnetralized energy grid of the future lies the idea, that every little watt counts and should be consumed where it is produced (and vice versa) and you produce energy form renewable sources in any way possible. TFA says it is a test and as such it should be welcomed as good and creative thinking to be judged based on results (which are not yet available, I presume).
Traffic signals use active induction loops to detect ferrous objects above them. If you move a magnet through a magnetic field so that it crosses field lines energy can be recovered from the motion. Thats how generators work of course. But then you may as well use trains with linear motors instead of cars.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Newsflash! Supermarket requires customers to pay for electricity that the supermarket uses!
Next you'll be telling me that shop assistant's wages are paid by a small portion of the money that we hand over at the till.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/15/sainsburys-kinetic-plates-speed-bumps
This makes it clear the plates are supposed to generate 30kWh per hour, rather than per car (but I can't help thinking, whats wrong with simply saying 30kW?) This version of the article also points out that the energy is not free and does in fact come from the cars.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"Hey babe, come back to my place and let's generate some electricity."
Um. Who supplies the energy to make the plates go back up?
I once measured my cars efficiency (an old Renault 5).
I drove 100 kph (28m/s) on a flat freeway, with no wind, and set the gears in neutral. It took the car about 30 seconds to slow down to 90kph (25m/s). The car weighs about 900kg.
So we have E0=0.5*m*v*v = 353kJ and E1=281kJ. The car lost 717kJ in 30 seconds or 2.4kW
So it takes just 2.4kW to keep a small car cruising at 100kph on a freeway. The stated gas consumption of that car is about 1 liter/18 km at 90 kph so 1.3 ml/second of gasoline. Gasoline has ca 32MJ/l energy content, so 1.3ml/s is equivalent to 44kW.
The system efficiency of a car cruising on a flat freeway is about 5%!
Do the experiment yourself and see what numbers you come up with. It's also a really good highschool experiment.
Neat toy, but too complicated to be useful. If you want to generate net energy you generally have to keep it simple, stupid. The energy generated by this particular system will likely never return even a percent of the extra energy used to build and repair it. If it lasts for 5 years between repairs, which I doubt, it will generate 5*30 = 150 kWh of energy. The repairman that comes to repair the system every five years will burn hundreds of MWh worth of fuel while driving to and from the store...
I jog thru their car park 3 times a week on my way to the gym. Will I be generating electricity for them if I run over these devices?
Forget cars. We should line playgrounds with these plates and force kids to "have recess."
They might be coasting to the other side of the carpark or leaving it altogether , in which case if this slows them down too much they'll hit the throttle before they brake again.
This wasn't designed by engineers to be green , it was designed as greenwash with the supermarket saving a few quid off their electricity bills in the process.
It is true that the enerygy is ultimately coming from the cars engine.But when you place this at a place where you would normaly have placed a speed bump , it actually makes sense and can be a WIN WIN situation for both parties. the plates will convert the car's energy winch otherwise would have been wasted by the cars brakes and shock absorbers. :) (that will be rather hard to measure though.)
The supermarket: get some "free" energy.
The Car Owner : well atleast his brakes and shock absorbers will last a bit longer
p.s "free" but they still have some cost for the installation.
> The plates create as much as 30 kWh of energy as cars drive over them
That should read 'The plates steal up to 30kWh of energy that their own customers have paid for'.
Whats the next business plan? Tapping into the huge reserves of free hubcaps?
I'm paying 10 cents per kWh. So at my rates, that's a whopping $3.00 per month they're saving.
How much did all that equipment cost? How long will it take to pay it off at that rate?
I'm thinking someone failed to do the cost/benefit analysis.
n/t
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
Everyone's bitching about "stealing energy". But this is England. Gloucester, England, a fairly provincial sort of place (incidentally, my American readers, it's pronounced 'Gloster') - I actually know this supermarket. After a few weeks, the mechanism will break down. I might get repaired once or twice, but it will break down again. The management will stick a sign on it saying "out of order". Then after a while that'll be removed and the plate will be permanently fixed in position or removed and tarmaced over. Don't worry about stealing energy, this is how all low-cost, locally engineered, locally paid for schemes on this scale pan out in the UK.
Swans don't burn so well, nowadays we use Eagles.
built into the road network, could save on lighting it! put tax back in our pockets?
How is this offtopic? The guy just made a joke of a troll.
Why not people? I've been skeptical of this technology for a while, because I can't see it producing a useful amount of energy. I'm not an engineer though. I do wonder, however, why they don't put these into sports arenas. If you put them under the fans seats, every time the fans started to move while cheering, you'd harvest the energy they produce. Even here, though, I wonder if the amount of energy produced would be enough to offset the creation energy.
The energy must come from somewhere - in this case it comes from your gas tank and it is inefficiently converted to kinetic energy. Whole schema is yet another gas tax on the customers..
At the Sainsbury supermarket in Dartmouth, Devon, near where I live, they have put a wind turbine in the car park 'to power the tills'. I have never seen it rotate. At each new store they are doing some faux 'green' initiative, ideally as headline grabbing as possible to gain green cred. I should be interested to know the balance between electricity produced and the cost of production and laying in of the equipment.
Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not true.
My text says 717kJ delta, but that is 71.7 kJ. I used the correct number to reach 2.4kW.
I stand by my conclusion that if we could apply 2.4kW with 100% efficiency to the wheels, we could keep this car going steady at 100kph on a flat road with no wind.
Major losses are: 1) the engine itself, at best some 25%, when running at optimal load, 2) the gearbox and stuff, 3) auxiliary loads (alternator, airco).
You can see from this whole calculation that air drag and such are hardly important.
I think we can agree that the numbers given in the article are BS, and that the device steals energy from your car--that's basic physics.
But what about the amount of energy required to construct the thing in the first place? My calculations say this thing produces ~30 watts, and lets assume a 20 year lifespan.
30 watts * 24 hours/day *365 days/year * 20 years = 5000 kW. So the entire device would have to be constructed (metal / concrete mined, shipped, manufactured, installed) using significantly less than that much energy for anyone to even consider calling this "green."
they should do something similar with free ways, or at least off ramps.
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Didn't they do something like this in Superman 3?
Good God, if you haven't already, don't read any more of these comments. All they will teach you is that the average slashdotter either fails to read TFA, mistakenly believes they understand thermodynamics better than anyone else, or both.
I read TFA, for what little info it provided. I've read many of the comments, too. More smoke and heat than light in them.
So is this energy generation parasitic? In practice (not in theory), is it increasing the fuel consumption of the cars? Many of the comments tacitly assume that it is.
Or is this energy being recovered from what would otherwise be wasted as heat in braking? If the plates are positioned in places where cars would have to slow down anyway, the system is not only recovering energy, it is also reducing wear on brake pads: a direct benefit to the driver. This is especially the case if the plates are installed on downward ramps, where the car is converting potential to kinetic energy that has to be shed somehow.
An interesting example of recoverable energy is the transport of grain from the intermountain plateau of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon to Portland, Oregon, where it is loaded on ships. There is an average drop of elevation of at least 2,000 feet, most of the transport is done by trains with diesel electric locomotives. Each grain car weighs 125 tons or more when loaded; there are at least 100 cars in a train. So that is dropping more than 12,500 tons off a small mountain with every train coming into Portland.
Here's what's neat: diesel electric locomotives use regenerative braking to slow these trains. Currently the electricity recovered is sent to resistance heaters and disposed as hot air. But it could be sent to flywheel storage units mounted on gimbals on special rail cars behind the engines (typically at least 4 engines, not needed to pull, but necessary for applying sufficient braking).
So here's a question for the reader to consider: assuming a perfect (non loss) system for transferring braking energy from the wheels to the flywheel batteries, how much energy could one of these trains deliver to the Portland power grid? This isn't a piece of blue sky by the way: New York City subways have been using flywheel batteries as load balancers for many years now.
For bonus points: Coal is mined in the Rocky Mountains and shipped by rail to Chicago. If the electricity now wasted as heat by the locomotives' regenerative braking could be stored in flywheel batteries, how much additional power would be extracted from each ton of coal as it is moved down hill?
Will
Another way to calculate this:
I lost 3 m/s in 30 seconds, so my deceleration is 0.1m/s^2. The car weighs 900kg, so F= 90N. If I had applied 90N, the car would have stayed at speed. 90N * 28m/s = 2.5kW. Same figure.
it's purely a gimmick... making them seem green using energy from the cars that are entering their road.
The device is positioned right at the entrance to the complex and it's NOT in a position where you would be naturally slowing down, it's precisely where you would be accelerating after having turned into their road off the traffic lights at the junction.
If they were serious about using this energy source, then there'd be lots more of them, each situated immediately before a corner in the road where you would have to brake anyway. And there's plenty of corners in the maze leading into the car park...
Everything about this smacks of gimmicky green initiatives that make the company appear green...
Our local Tesco is also trying to appear "green" by installing a wind turbine and solar arrays... they're having a problem getting the wind turbine approved as the nimbys are objecting to it on grounds of noise, interference with TV signals, being obtrusive...
Sainsbury went for the gimmicky plate idea as it is very visible when entering their store and also couldn't be blocked by the nimbys either.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
All the doors in our house have 'kinetic energy' hinges. I gradually increased the tension and you should see the arms we all have around here now.
Seriously the stupidest thing I have ever seen. As all the above posts have already stated: the energy will come from the car, and thus form fuel. If you take it away from people (by putting the plate at the store entrance) I would consider that a nice experiment. This, however, is just plain stupid.
They may as well have customers park their cars in break-test rollers!
Eh, if they're modifying a pre-existing road, they can just stand there for 10 minutes and see if most drivers brake.
They "might be"? Sure, they might walk or bike to the store too, which is pretty damn energy efficient... but most don't. If a substantial portion of the population were coasting, they would not need speed bumps to begin with. The fact that the speed bumps ARE necessary means most people don't coast and there is a net gain of energy efficiency here assuming the kinetic plate liberates more energy than it consumes during its creation, installation and maintenance. Granted, the gain in efficiency is that the store is using some of the energy the cars needlessly generated, but people do lots of stupid things they shouldn't while driving their cars. Think of it as trying to salvage an inherently flawed system to make it more efficient.
The GP is right, slashdot is full of contrarians sometimes.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Agree: it's theft, AND a very inefficient way of generating electricity. We should be moving away from biofuel generation (and this is yet more inefficiency).
Put a dymnamo on a pair of lifts on a multi-storey car park, for the cars GOING DOWN :o)
It doesn't seem likely that this thing could recoup the cost of installing it in any reasonable timeframe.
I think this is just stealing some energy from your not-so-green car.
How green this is depends on how green your car is - the usual car is very inefficient utilizing energy.
It might be a lot more efficient and green to hook up the market to some large scale power-plant.
Or?
If you want to save energy and the planet, don't install a traffic light at all. I have never seen traffic queues at broken traffic lights as long as the queues at working traffic lights.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.